Sweet Silver Blues by Glen Cook Page B

doubt.”
    “Probably. But that’s the kind of detail you keep an ear out for. Sometimes they add up to a picture people don’t know they’re giving you, like brush strokes add up to a painting.”
    The peacocks raised thirteen kinds of hell when they discovered us. They crowed like they hadn’t had anything to holler about for years.
    “My god,” I murmured. “She hasn’t changed a bit.”
    “She was always old and ugly?” Morley asked, staring at the woman who observed our approach from a balcony on the side of the house.
    “Hasn’t even changed her clothes. Careful with her. She’s some kind of half-hulder witch.”
    A little man in a green suit and red stocking cap raced across our path cackling something in a language I didn’t understand. Morley grabbed a rock and started to throw it. I stopped him. “What’re you doing?”
    “They’re vermin, Garrett. Maybe they run on their hind legs and make noises that sound like speech, but they’re as much vermin as any rat.” But he let the rock drop.
    I have definite feelings about rats, even the kind that walk on their hind legs and talk and do socially useful things like dig graves. I understood Morley’s mood if not his particular prejudice.
    The Old Witch—I never heard her called anything else—grinned down at us. Hers was a classic gap-toothed grin. She looked like every witch from every witch story you’ve ever heard. There was no shaking my certainty that it was deliberate.
    A mad cackle floated down. The peafowl answered as though to one of their own.
    “Spooky,” Morley said.
    “That’s her image. Her game. She’s harmless.”
    “So you say.”
    “That was the word on her when I was here before. Crazy as a gnome on weed, but harmless.”
    “Nobody who harbors those little vipers is harmless. Or blameless. You let them skulk around your garden, they breed like rabbits, and first thing you know they’ve driven all the decent folk away with their malicious tricks.”
    We were up under the balcony now. I forbore mentioning his earlier response to a gardener’s bigotry. It wouldn’t have done any good. Folks always believe their own racism is the result of divine inspiration, incontestably valid.
    My dislike for rat people is, of course, the exception to the rule of irrationality underlying such patterns of belief.
    The Old Witch cackled again, and the peafowl took up the chorus once more. She called down, “He was murdered, you know.”
    “Who was?” I asked.
    “The man you were looking for, Private Garrett. Syndic Klaus. They think no one knows. But they are wrong. They were seen. Weren’t they, my little pretties?”
    “How did you . . . ?”
    “You think you and that girl could sneak through here night after night, running to that cemetery to slake your lusts, without the little people noticing? They tell me everything, they do. And I never forget a name or a face.”
    “Did I say they were vermin?” Morley demanded. “Lurking in the shadows of tombstones watching you. And probably laughing their little black hearts out because there is no sight more ridiculous than people coupling.”
    Maybe I reddened a little, but otherwise I ignored him. “Who killed him?” I asked. “And why?”
    “We could name some names, couldn’t we, my little pretties? But to what purpose? There is no point now.”
    “Could you at least tell me why he was killed?”
    “He found out something that was not healthy for him to know.” She cackled again. The peafowl cheered her on. It was a great joke. “Didn’t he, my little pretties? Didn’t he?”
    “What might that have been?”
    The laughter left her face and eyes. “You won’t be hearing it from me. Maybe that machuska Kayean knows. Ask her when you find her. Or maybe she doesn’t. I don’t know. And I don’t care.”
    That was the second time that day I’d heard Kayean called machuska, and only the second time I’d heard the word since I had gotten out of the Marines and the